Francesco Boldizzoni is a professor of Political Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which he joined in 2019 from the University of Helsinki. He first received tenure at the University of Turin, where he taught economic history from 2011 to 2016. Over the years, he has had visiting appointments at several other institutions, including Dartmouth College, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, London School of Economics, and the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies, and has given numerous lectures around the world. He has been a life member of Clare Hall, Cambridge, since 2007.

His field of work is the political and economic origins of our time, and in particular the problems of capitalism. He looks at these issues through historical lenses, paying special attention to culture and ideas as forces that drive both human behavior and our understanding of it. His latest work, Foretelling the End of Capitalism (Harvard UP 2020), examines the errors of social provision since Karl Marx and offers an explanation for the persistence of capitalism, while calling into question its future prospects. His current book project, The Decent Society, presents a normative argument for social democracy in the 21st century. His writings have been translated into Arabic, French, Italian, Spanish and Turkish.

He is the author of Foretelling the End of Capitalism: Intellectual Misadventures since Karl Marx (Harvard University Press, 2020), The Poverty of Clio: Resurrecting Economic History (Princeton University Press, 2011), and Means and Ends: The Idea of Capital in the West, 1500-1970 (Macmillan, 2008).